A Woman With My Sister's Face Held The Lift For Me Two Years After The Funeral

My sister died at thirty-one. This is not that story, and I am not going to make you sit through it.

Two years later, in an office building in a city she had never lived in, a woman held the lift for me.

She was not my sister. I need to say that clearly, because I have said it to myself every day for six years. She was taller. Her hair was different. She was wearing a coat my sister would have hated and said so, loudly, in a shop.

But she had my sister's face.

Not "a bit like". The thing under the face. The set of it. The exact, particular way that one eyebrow does not agree with the other. The chip in the front tooth, which my sister got at fourteen falling off a wall she had been told not to walk on.

She held the door. I got in.

And she pressed the button for the seventh floor, which is my floor, and she did not ask me, and I had not said anything, and she did not press a button for herself.

We went up together. Eleven seconds, maybe.

She did not look at me. She looked at the doors, the way everybody looks at the doors.

At the seventh floor she stepped aside to let me out, and as I passed her she said — and this is the only thing she said, and she said it lightly, in a voice that was not my sister's voice — "Go on, then."

That is what my sister said. To me. Constantly. About everything. Get a haircut, ask her out, take the job, go on, then.

I turned round in the corridor and the doors were closing and she was looking at the wall of the lift, and then she was gone.

The lift went down. I checked, because I am not completely stupid: I watched the numbers.

There is no seventh floor above seven. There is nothing above seven; it is the top.

I have never seen her again. I have looked. I have loitered in that lobby like a lunatic. I have described her to reception, who were very kind.

Go on, then.

I did, in the end. All of it. I did the things she would have made me do.